Saturday, April 9, 2011

King Dariross The Obscure and the Art of Changing Horses

My original aims for the Gathering was to refurbish my OS 25mm ancients and get them on the table, making use of as many existing figures as possible and without adding too many figures. Still good aims and the logic that picked the Lydian campaign as the best route to that goal is still sound. However, I missed a couple of key factors.

I wanted to paint up more Medes & Persians but in order to have a valid use for them, I needed more Lydians even though I already knew that I was tired of painting Greeks and Greek type troops. So, the Persians sit and wait while I work through a list of Greek-ish Lydians, or rather don't work through it. I wouldn't mind adding something different like a big phalanx of Egyptian spearmen for Thymbra as per Xenephon but the coffers are bare.

I did briefly consider Hyboria but I wanted to stay with the historical fantasy approach and the Mede & Persian empire. Luckily, I don't need to scrap any of the troops I have done up or the campaign itself. After all we all knew going into this that the Lydians would eventually be conquered, it was just a matter of when so I can incorporate the Lydians, Phyggians, Thracians and Greeks into the Persian army as subjects and mercenaries and reserve the option to come back and play out the Lydian campaign later.

So its off to the mysterious East. Expansion of the empire is one possibility but there were numerous revolts and what better use for my armies than a civil war? The image in my mind are a series of walled towns, near the mountains, the Caspian on one flank, India on the other. Horse archers, proto-cataphracts, city militia and a few elephants. hmmmmm

Another change since I started this trip is that my experiment with WHAB style individual figures and movement trays has failed. I'm going back to my old standard elements. Now that doesn't necessarily affect the rules that I started working on, but as long as I am making changes, this seems like the time. Having quite enjoyed playing some games with Bob Cordery's gridded wargame, I think it may be time to have another look at Morschauser and have a fresh go at an element set.